Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space, huh?

OK, so you may be wondering what the heck I’m talking about with all this Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space nuttyness. Well, I’ve been trying to explain to students a bit about how Google works and how quickly they can index and rank a new page of content.

So how on earth did I come up with the phrase “Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space“? Well to be honest I pulled it out of my butt one day when I was doing a search. I was trying to demonstrate the idea of Keyword Proximity – the idea that sometimes, words that appear close to one another can be one of the determining factors that Google can use to serve up results.

The results were interesting to say the least. 3,740,000 results, a stuffed animal and a tarantula?

Of course no site actually contained the phrase Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space, most of the top ranked sites had each of the words in that phrase in one place or another. I liked the page about tarantulas the best showing images of those with “pink toes”, one also know as the “straight horned baboon“, and the bit of info that one required lots of “ample space” , and finally how “Slings have a fuzzy orange abdomen”. ICH!

All this just showed how Google picked up on the individual words in the phrase Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space and used them to display results that they felt might have been what you were looking for.

This shows us that if you use words from a phrase in close proximity to one another on the page that they do have some potential for helping you rank. Of course this ranking factor is only strongly targeted when there are not a lot of options to choose from.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this post to get ranked for Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space. If/When it does, it will most likely be the only page on the web optimized for that phrase.

Steve Scott is the CEO & Director of Training at the Tampa SEO Training Academy. He has taught SEO skills to people from around the world and currently offers his hands-on search engine optimization training workshops in Tampa to individuals and businesses of all sizes. Corporate SEO training classes and consulting are also available.

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Follow Up: Just 4 minutes after publishing this post a student did a search for Pink Fuzzy Baboons in Space and discovered that the post and the blog homepage were ranked 1 and 2 in GoogLe’s index. That speed impressed even me (not to mention most everyone in class as well).